


bite down into me

by glassedplanets



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gambit (Destiny), M/M, Mild/Implied Sexual Content, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:20:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24446482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassedplanets/pseuds/glassedplanets
Summary: A collection of miscellaneous Shin/Drifter fills, fragments, etc. Tags apply in general.
Relationships: The Drifter/Shin Malphur
Comments: 7
Kudos: 79





	1. failed

**Author's Note:**

> title is [lyrics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL1WuxL2bMc)!

Drifter’s laughing so hard, he might actually be crying. He’s bent double over the railing, deep laughs from his gut echoing discordantly through the Derelict.

Shin fumes.

“You–” Drifter gasps. “You fuckin’–” And he’s gone again, practically howling.

“You put me with three Guardians who were two days rezzed against four clanmates in full Prime sets been playin’ since the start,” he snaps. “No surprise I lost.”

Drifter’s still laughing when Shin jumps up and vaults over the railing, and he’s still laughing when his back hits the ground. 

“Could cook a fuckin’ omelet on your helmet,” Drifter wheezes, and drags a hand across his eyes. He _is_ crying with laughter. Shin kneels over him and wrings a hand into his robes.

“Could cook _you_.”

Drifter doesn’t sober up at all, and it’s the most insulting thing he’s ever done to Shin.

“Could make it up to you,” Drifter counters. He’s still laughing, but his amusement is sharper now, his smile a little darker, his hands insistent as he pulls Shin down in turn.

“You can try,” Shin snarls, putting forth his coldest shoulder, but he’s always run too hot and his thin resolve fails him yet again as Drifter laughs against his neck.


	2. teeth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: blood, minor injury

"You Hunters are all alike," Drifter says, as Shin walks up to the massive skull in the corner, his leer matching that bare grinning maw. "Always drawn to the sharpest thing in the room."

Shin lets out a snort. This junkyard mausoleum of a ship is full of _things_ , sharp and otherwise, and Drifter's been trailing him like a shadow as he paces through each winding, kitbashed room and takes in all the scraps of irrefutable proof of all the tales he'd been spinning. Shin hadn’t had much reason to doubt him, but there’s something different about being able to touch an object so grotesquely exotic it cannot be anything other than fact.

The skull stares down at him, and Shin stares back. Whatever this creature is – had been – it doesn't resemble anything he's ever seen. The skull is sharp and sleek, bone thick and fluted for many eyes. Or other things. Teeth like knives, slim and sharp. Whatever it is in death, whatever it was in life, Shin feels no concern, no press of itching darkness. Much like the man he knew under a different name, this Dark-age drifter has no real interest in whispers or bones that hold too much promise.

Shin brushes a fingertip along the edge of one sleek fang, edged so fine it’s nearly translucent. His glove splits cleanly, immediately, the pad of his finger cleft nearly to bone. The pain doesn't hit for a full few seconds, and even then it's dull, clean, accepted, and the pulse that pounds in his palm is matched in counterpoint by Drifter's soft footsteps closing behind him.

"Predictable bastard,” Drifter purrs from over Shin's shoulder, breath stirring his cloak, voice mocking. “Go on. Prove me right again.”

Drifter's not wrong about sharp things, but he is wrong. This knife-jawed skull is not the sharpest thing in the room. 

When Drifter reaches around to grab his wrist, Shin lets him. Bright blood rolls down Shin's palm, beading over Drifter's dark gloves, drawing a thick, shining line over his thumb as it curves, inevitable, towards each dip of pressure made by his fingertips. His presence at Shin’s back isn’t heat or cold or anything like it, just a vacuum of negative space, and his body wants to fill it. 

Drifter brushes the edge of his hood back like he's brushing hair off Shin's shoulder, with a light and fleeting touch that's countered immediately by cool, gloves fingers sliding under his collar. Shin tips his head back and Drifter takes the invitation for what it is.

Funny, though, he thinks as Drifter's insincere smile presses against his neck, as Drifter's grip shifts in sluggish congealing blood, as he contends with another set of teeth against his skin. Sharp things get drawn to him too.


	3. lace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> non-literal interpretations only in this house

Shin makes sure his footsteps make no noise on the frost that carpets the Derelict. It’s colder than usual.

It’s not often that he’s caught Drifter asleep like this. Drifter is, generally, far too paranoid to not be instantly woken if someone moves within half a mile of him, though a small part of Shin’s traitorous mind notes that Drifter doesn’t seem to mind falling asleep with Shin around.

The culprit of the colder-than-usual environment is laid out on a workbench splattered with grease and radiolarian acid burns: one of Drifter's containment units, halfway taken apart. He'd been grumbling about some malfunction last Shin had seen him.

Frost lies softly over his robes, inching up his neck, settling like fine lace over his beard, his slightly parted lips. His robes have fallen open, just slightly, even though his arms are crossed and he’s hunched between the wall and the back of his chair. The ice creeps down his chest, too, in hard-edged fractals threaded over skin and dark hair.

Shin strips a glove off. He can feel the chill, more than just what his HUD tells him. Indulgence or foolishness, he doesn’t know which prompts him to do it, but he presses his palm against Drifter's chest. The ice melts into dew, pearling against his skin, glittering in strands of coarse hair.

"Hot," Drifter murmurs. 

Only thanks to years of forced composure does Shin refrain from jumping. He hadn’t noticed a change in pulse, in breath, in anything. Either Drifter’d been faking his sleep, or he’d slid from asleep to awake more smoothly than Shin’s ever seen anyone do. Frankly, no telling which is more likely.

Drifter’s skin is going from pink to red under Shin's hand, and he lifts it away. 

The water Shin had melted out is starting to freeze again in a steady, frenzied creep blooming from the outside in, converging on the dip of Drifter's sternum and climbing up his chest, weaving infinitely variable patterns that seamstresses and engineers alike have sought to imitate for thousands of years.

“Cold,” Shin replies, tipping his head towards the containment unit.

Drifter hooks two fingers into his waistband and pulls so that Shin’s standing against the edge of the chair, between the careless sprawl of his legs, and says, “So warm me up, hotshot.”


	4. enthralled

Drifter feels like he’s drowning. The air is thick and slow, as if all the worst summers he ever dreamt of on that damn ball of ice have come to life and are crawling down his throat. Like he’s moving through molasses. 

Even Shin’s sharp movements are dulled somehow. His fingertips have long dug bruises into Drifter’s wrists and his lip is curled with impending danger/pleasure/something/anything but all sensations have long melted together in a haze, and all Drifter can pay attention to anymore are Shin’s eyes, flitting from Drifter’s lips to his throat to his chest. Every time he’s looked away, sharp prickling things have crawled down his back and bloomed in his chest. Better to give into paranoia. Let this useless fear snake around his neck one more time.

No, Drifter thinks, not useless. Nothing useless about fearing this man. Nothing useless about refusing the cold, press of a sweaty forehead against his temple like some kind of submission, or the ragged, panting breaths beating against his neck. Nothing useless about guarding himself against whatever this is, taking root here between his ribs, like a knife buried to the hilt.

Feeling crawls back into Drifter’s hands, slowly, as Shin’s fingertips slide down to rest against the still-racing pulse in his wrists. His fingers twitch. Shin’s move again as he blows out a sigh and rolls gracelessly, sluggishly to the side, the movement as slow as everything else has been in his periphery. Sweat glints on his forehead, in his hair, at the tip of his nose and caught in the divot of his philtrum, crowning his lip. Drifter watches as the weariness settles in and eases the corner of his mouth, the slight dip between his eyebrows.

His eyes don’t leave Shin’s until consciousness leaves him.


	5. blush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry aunor

Aunor ducks into the warrens lining the Annex, flexing her hand. The Aura is still active, buzzing around and through her, and she deeply resents how much she's come to enjoy this aposematic thrill. _Fear me_ , written in iridescent green scales rippling across her shoulders _; I hunt the enemies of humanity_ in Vanguard blue. _Don't count yourself among them_. 

Drifter's end of the Annex is quiet; Aunor's become an expert at waiting out the post-match crowds full of wannabe Dredgens and off-season Crucible upstarts, all clamoring for a compliment or a new gun. Aunor doesn't want a new gun, and she wants Drifter's compliments even less.

She rounds the corner just in time to see the smile disappear off of Drifter's face, lost behind the drape of a very familiar Hunter's hood as he leans in, the echo of a quiet laugh fading into the corners of this dingy room.

She considers coming back later (Drifter's "friend" runs a hand down his lapel like he's got all the time in the world), but she's already here (Drifter tucks a hand into the hood, pushing it back), and there's no sense leaving just to come back. Aunor has interrupted Guardians doing much worse than sharing affection.

Before Aunor can clear her throat, Drifter's eyes cut over to her, glinting in the light of the bank, and – wonder upon wonders – a dash of pink gathers high in his cheeks as he leans away.

Interesting. She'd thought the man incapable of embarrassment. 

Neither of them had jumped or flinched, but Drifter looks close to it anyways, something cagey in his expression taking root when his partner (in crime or otherwise, Aunor doesn't really know and doesn't really care) doesn't move away from him, just shifts so he can see her, and so she can see him.

"Miss Aunor," Shin says politely, nodding at her.

"Hunter," she replies, keenly aware of the Praxic surveillance presiding over these halls, and she nods back. "Good game, earlier."

"Couldn't have done it without you," he says, trading politeness for sheer honesty. "Wasn't sure we were gonna make it after our Sentry fumbled that first invasion."

Drifter scoffs and rolls his eyes before Aunor can reply that it was _his_ sharp eye and quick hand that let them recover after their Sentry's blunder.

"You got a reason for bein' here, Miss Aunor?" he asks. "Or you just fishin' for compliments?"

Aunor ignores his words entirely and gestures for Bahaghari to transmit over their stack of finished bounties. Drifter squints at a display, then sends back a modest pile of Glimmer and some armor schematics she dismantles immediately.

"You should try Sentry some time," he says, fishing in a pocket. "You'd be good at it."

He tosses a bright yellow token at her, then holds up three of the Reaper-green ones she's after between his knuckles, like a taunt. Shin hums in thoughtful agreement and leans back, bracing one hand against the railing behind Drifter.

"I have no interest in killing Guardians," Aunor replies, tossing the Sentry token back.

"Not in Gambit," Drifter mutters.

"Not ever," she says sharply. "Don't confuse my sense of justice for your partner's."

The flush creeps further up Drifter's cheeks. Maybe it _is_ indignant, not embarrassed. Oh well. Not her problem to sort out. The tokens in his hand fizzle away into data as he finally transmats them to her, expression shuttering. Shin looks over at him, curious, eyes lowering as he follows the flush now curling under the collar of Drifter's robes.

"Huh," he says, then looks back at Aunor. "I can't contest that. Different strokes."

"I'll be back next week," Aunor says, turning away. "You can get back to what you were doing."

She doesn't take much more than three steps out into the hall before the two blips on her radar disappear simultaneously. Aunor shakes her head and makes her way towards the stairs, pulling up her notes for Ikora.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set around/before season of the drifter

“Not today, Malphur,” Drifter says once the last of the Guardians have cleared out, leaving the alley empty. He sounds tired and blurred, nothing like all the other times those words have dripped sharp from his mouth like knives.

Shin stops and thinks about this.

“Drifter,” he starts, but he’s cut off by the jarring sound of jade against Cabal plasteel, coins rattling with the force of Drifter's throw.

“ _Shin_ ,” Drifter repeats back, and there it is again: the tone should be mocking at best, lancing at worst, and it is, simply, none of those things.

“Okay,” Shin says, and slowly turns away. He takes long, measured strides towards the bricked archway back into the Annex’s warrens, trying and failing to not heed the many-legged thing crawling up his spine.

When he glances over his shoulder, Drifter has his back turned to the doorway, grip tight on the railing.

Shin’s made up his mind by the time he’s got one foot on the rattling staircase.

* * *

“What’s that,” Drifter says suspiciously, voice flat.

“Katsudon,” Shin replies, tilting the bowl. The egg quivers under the plastic cover, golden yolk ready to spill out across its bed of rice and crisp breaded pork, fried onions gleaming. “Shop fucked up the first order, gave me two.”

Drifter squints down at the steaming bowl, and then up at Shin.

“You’re a shitty liar,” he accuses, and snatches the food out of his hand anyways.

* * *

They fuck. As per usual. Except not.

Drifter is distant until he isn’t, oddly restrained until some dam in him breaks and he wrings Shin’s pleasure out of him so thoroughly that Shin still feels lightheaded minutes after, and he can still feel the way Drifter’s hands had shaken as they’d pinned down his wrists, grip unrelenting.

Drifter hasn’t kicked him out yet, and neither has Shin fled. That crawling sensation at the back of his neck has quieted; maybe it’s taken root somewhere deeper instead, surfacing now as a faint prickling every time Drifter’s arm brushes against his shoulder, a thin, warm wash of sensation.

Shin watches as Drifter continues to rip into a ratty Warlock bond with a level of aggression the poor bond probably doesn’t deserve, propped up on one elbow and half-covered by one shoulder of his robes. There was a moment, before, where Drifter’s attention wasn’t split between two schematics, four matches, three arenas, who knows what else; Shin had watched that clouded focus sharpen and center entirely on him, like a knife to his throat, before Drifter had—

Hmm. 

"Penny for your thoughts?"

Drifter looks at him like he's lost his mind.

"The fuck's a penny?"

Shin scowls.

“I’m askin’ what you’re thinkin’ about.”

Drifter looks back down at the bond, then wrenches the last of its guts out and starts peeling apart two of the layers. This time, there’s a more calculated indifference to the tilt of his chin as his fingers pick through circuitry.

“What, you ain’t satisfied? Aimin’ for round two?”

“Maybe,” Shin says, and hooks a leg around Drifter’s under the ragged, worn sheets, then uses the ensuing, brief lapse in attention to grab him by the chin. The lethargy of cooled adrenaline still weighs heavy in his limbs; he pulls Drifter down and expects resistance, but Drifter falls like Shin took him by surprise, one hand half-covered in wires coming to rest on the other side of Shin’s head.

He tastes – well, he tastes like Shin, and like the heady richness of fat golden yolk, the perfect light tang of green onion, like the faint scent of hydraulics that chases him no matter where he goes. The wires plaited neatly around Drifter’s fingers spark as he shifts his weight to cover Shin, and Shin wonders if that distracted blankness is still in his eyes, because it’s not present in the hand that rakes roughly through his hair, nor is it in the sharp press of teeth against his skin.

It’s not ‘til later – several distractions later, new arenas and Vanguard investigations and an old weapon and unspoken revelations later – that Shin understands the depth of the chokehold the IX have on Drifter.

And, in the end, Drifter doesn’t ever find out exactly what a penny is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.ishtar-collective.net/search/penny


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> really in my feelings about Them tonight, i guess. thoroughly unbeta'd and stream-of-consciousness.

The radiance is so blinding that he can’t see anymore, just feel the presence of Light bundled into humanoid shapes, sense the impressions it leaves washing up against the edges of buildings, tangling in the hair of regular City-folk.

Beside him, Drifter is still. The Darkness doesn’t sit heavily the way it still tends toward festering deep in Shin’s core, but it flows easily through him, like oil to the Light’s water. There’s envy in the sight, and other things besides. The Light is so dense on his skin that he can’t feel if his shoulder is brushing Drifter’s. He hasn’t been able to see for close to an hour, now; he turns his head anyways, looking towards the miasmatic gathering of Light burning over Dark that makes up this man with no name. When he exhales, it’s more Light than air. Maybe he’s burning; he can’t tell.

The Traveler pulses again, a deep hum that sets his bones alight for one note, for one beat, and realigns the lifeblood thrumming through every Lightbearer. He’s aware of a sensation of some kind; difficult to parse, impossible to understand. The limb that might be his arm (is this a new shape?) is experiencing something that might be called a chill. Heat has no meaning, nor does pressure. The sensation moves, or perhaps it doesn’t. Light is all there is here. Light is _almost_ all there is here. It is smothered on what used to be his cheek by the smallest ink-drop of whatever is antithetical: not life-and-death or heat-and-cold but presence and absence, an incomprehensible touch of _not_ against the overwhelming _be_. The absence shifts, retracts, melts against him once more in a pulse halfway in time with the presence.

The Traveler sings. She is the lead instrument and she is the tiniest voice in the chorus. She hears; we roar. There is no singular. Plurality is eternal.

* * *

When the Light is gone – and it is simply _gone_ , all at once, there is no warning before the harsh disconnect of inhabiting his body again, of being Shin Malphur, son of Jaren, son of Palamon, and not simply one star in the chorus of Alpha Lupi – his hands burn with frostbite. The air is frigid without Her – _their_ – song. His vision is blown; there’s no light, not even City lights, but the Light that ever burns in him is dimmed back to a manageable inferno.

The staggered breathing in his ears isn’t his alone. He blinks; he raises his head; he flexes his burning palms to find that that particular feat is impossible. The ice pressed against his skin is unmistakable, hard-edged and fractious.

Familiar. Not the ice, but the palms behind it.

He exhales, and it’s more air than Light. He inhales, and it’s ice-nine frosting the edge of a mouth he knows far too well.


End file.
